A Poet’s-Eye View
Bong Joon Ho’s film Parasite (2019) unfolds in two of the most memorable domestic spaces in recent cinema: the Kim family’s squalid apartment, on a Seoul...
A Mind in Pain
The Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is now best known for two works: the Gothic novel Uncle Silas and Carmilla, the first great tale of...
‘All One’s Capacities’
In 1994, shortly after her husband’s death, the Australian-born novelist Shirley Hazzard was quoted in The New York Times as saying that their three-decade marriage had...
The Human Costs of AI
In 2015 a cohort of well-known scientists and entrepreneurs including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak issued a public letter urging technologists developing artificial intelligence...
Nature’s Evolving Tastes
“The wholesale murders going [on] now in Paris are heartrending.” Charles Darwin received this news in a letter from the paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky, dated May 28,...
In the Fire
The Egyptian writer, doctor, and agitator Nawal El Saadawi passed away in Cairo on March 21, 2021, at the age of eighty-nine. Despite decades of threats,...
What Does the Microbiome Do?
We live life with companions. Some, like parents, are present from our moment of birth; others are met at school or work and become friends or...
Hollywood’s Master Builder
Revisions of the modern architectural canon have been going on for almost as long as modern architecture itself. But our perceptions of what constitutes excellence in...
The CCP’s Culture of Fear
Roughly two thousand years ago, the arrival in China of Buddhism from India brought major changes not only to China’s belief systems but to many aspects...
